Description

DreamHost has its own Cloud – DreamObjects™ – an inexpensive, scalable object storage service that was developed from the ground up to provide a reliable, flexible cloud storage solution for entrepreneurs and developers. It provides a perfect, scalable storage solution for your WordPress site.

Well now that we’ve gotten the sales-pitch out of the way, DreamObjects Connections will plugin your WordPress site into DreamObjects, tapping into the amazing power of automated backups!

Please do not open DreamHost Support Tickets for this plugin. Post in the support forum here, and I’ll get to you ASAP.

Backup Features

Automatically backs up your site (DB and files) to your DreamObjects cloud on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.

Retains a limitable number of backups at any given time (so as not to charge you the moon when you have a large site).

Yes, but this isn’t an official DreamHost plugin at this time. It just works.

Do I have to host my website on DreamHost?

No, but using it anywhere else is unsupported. You have to use DreamObjects, which belongs to DreamHost. This plugin was built on and specifically for DreamHost servers, so I can give you no assurance it’ll work on other hosts. BotoRsync, for example, and WP-CLI are installed on DreamHost servers. I can’t vouch for any others. I haven’t tested this at all on Windows.

Can I use this on Multisite?

Not at this time. Backups for Multisite are a little messier, and I’m not sure how I want to handle that yet.

What does it backup?

Your database and your wp-content folder.

In a perfect world it would also backup your wp-config.php and .htaccess, but those are harder to grab since there aren’t consistent locations.

A quick way to test if this is happening still is by trying to only backup the SQL. If that works, then it’s the size of your total backup.

Wait, you said it could back up 2G! What gives?

There are a few things at play here:

The size of your backup

The file upload limit size in your PHP

The amount of server memory

The amount of available CPU

In a perfect world, you have enough to cope with all that. When you have a very large site, however, not so much. You can try increasing your PHP memory limit, or if your site really is that big, consider a VPS. Remember you’re using WordPress to run backups here, so you’re at the mercy of a middle-man. Just because PHP has a hard limit of 2G doesn’t mean it’ll even get that far.

I have, personally, verified a 250MB zip file, with no timeouts, no server thrashing, and no PHP errors, so if this is still happening, turn on debugging and check the log. If the log stalls on creating the zip, then you’ve hit the memory wall. It’s possible to increase your memory limit via PHP, however doing this on a shared server means you’re probably getting too big for this sort of backup solution in the first place. If your site is over 500megs and you’re still on shared, you need to seriously think about your future. This will be much less of an issue on VPS and dedicated boxes, where you don’t have the same limits.

Where’s the Database in the zip?

I admit, it’s in a weird spot: /wp-content/upgrade/RANDOM-dreamobjects-backup.sql

Why there? Security. It’s a safer spot, though safest would be a non-web-accessible folder. Maybe in the future. Keeping it there makes it easy for me to delete.

My backup is small, but it won’t back up!

Did you use defines for your HOME_URL and/or SITE_URL? For some reason, PHP gets bibbeldy about that. I’m working on a solution!

Using the Plugin

How often can I schedule backups?

You can schedule them daily, weekly, or monthly.

Can I force a backup to run now?

Yep! It actually sets it to run in 60 seconds, but works out the same.

I disabled wp-cron. Will this work?

Yes, provided you still call cron via a grownup cron job (i.e. ‘curl http://domain.com/wp-cron.php’). That will call your regular backups. ASAP backup, however, will need you to manually visit the cron page.

I kicked off an ASAP backup, but it says don’t refresh the page. How do I know it’s done?

By revisiting the page, but not pressing refresh. Refresh is a funny thing. It re-runs what you last did, so you might accidentally kick off another backup. You probably don’t want that. The list isn’t dynamically generated either, so just sitting on the page waiting won’t do anything except entertain you as much as watching paint dry.

My suggestions: Visit another part of your site and go get a cup of coffee, or something else that will kill time for about two minutes. Then come back to the backups page. Just click on it from the admin sidebar. You’ll see your backup is done.

(Yes, I want to make a better notification about that, I have to master AJAX.)

How long does it keep backups?

Since you get charged on space used for DreamObjects, the default is to retain the last 15 backups. If you need more, you can save up to 90 backups, however that’s rarely needed.

Can I keep them forever?

If you chose ‘all’ then yes, however this is not recommended. DreamObjects (like most S3/cloud platforms) charges you based on space and bandwidth, so if you have a large amount of files stored, you may be charged more money.

How do I use the CLI?

If you have wp-cli installed on your server (which DreamHost servers do), you can use the following commands:

Because we went with a slightly different feature with the CDN, and as such it’s best as a separate plugin. Don’t worry, they’ll play nice!

Where did the uploader go!?

Away. It was never really used well and the CDN plugin will handle this much better. WP’s just not the best tool for the job there.

Errors

Can I see a log of what happens?

You can enable logging on the main DreamObjects screen. This is intended to be temporary (i.e. for debugging weird issues) rather than something you leave on forever. If you turn off logging, the log wipes itself for your protection.

The automated backup is set to run at 3am but it didn’t run till 8am!

That’s not an error. WordPress kicks off cron jobs when someone visits your site, so if no one visited the site from 3am to 8am, then the job to backup wouldn’t run until then.

Why is nothing happening when I press the backup ASAP button?

First turn on logging, then run it again. If it gives output, then it’s running, so read the log to see what the error is. If it just ‘stops’, it should have suggestions as to why.

You can also log in via SSH and run wp dreamobjects backup to see if that works.